A Mysterious Something in the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler

By Tom Williams

The life of Raymond Chandler has long been obscured by secrets and half-truths as deceptive as anything in his novel The Long Goodbye. Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters, and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Tom Williams casts a new light on this most mysterious of writers.

The Raymond Chandler revealed is a man troubled by loneliness and desertion from an early age. Born in Chicago in 1888, his childhood was overshadowed by the collapse of his parents' marriage, his father's alcohol-fuelled violence eventually forcing the boy and his doting mother to leave for Ireland and later London. But class-bound England proved stifling, and Chandler, in his twenties and eager to forge a new life, returned to the United States where—in corruption-ridden Los Angeles—he met his one great love, Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior.

It was only during middle age, after his alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to crime fiction. And his legacy—the lonely, ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe—endures, compelling generations of crime writers to follow him.

In this long-awaited new biography, Tom Williams shadows one of the true literary giants of the twentieth century and considers how crime writing was raised to the level of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781613748435

Tom Williams

Tom Williams is a football writer and broadcaster who lives in London. Specialising in French and English football, he has had writing published by The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Athletic. He is the resident Premier League expert on the flagship French football programme Canal Football Club and a regular guest on the UK's leading football podcast, The Totally Football Show. He is the author of Do You Speak Football?. @tomwfootball

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PREFACE

In 1913 there were two arrivals in Los Angeles that would have lasting consequences for the city. The first was water, which came via a 223-mile aqueduct from the Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley, and allowed the city to grow beyond the limits of its natural resources. As this great and controversial feat of engineering was nearing completion, the second arrived. He wore a sharp suit, a straw boater circled with the colors of an English public school and carried a silver-tipped cane. His name was Raymond Chandler.

Ray was twenty-five in 1913 and he had spent the previous few months in San Francisco, working odd jobs, trying to make ends meet while supporting his mother, who had only recently joined him in America from England. He had been drawn to Los Angeles by a chance meeting on the ship that had ferried him from London to the United States, but the decision to venture there would be the making of him. Behind him, he had a difficult childhood, a complicated adolescence, and a failed career as a poet. In front of him, he had seven novels and a series of screenplays that would make him one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century. But, as Ray stepped for the first time into the bright, bleached light of L.A., he could not know how his future would unfold. In 1913 he was just a young man, freshly arrived, looking to start a new life.

This book examines how that shy man, born in Chicago, raised in London, and educated in an English public school steeped in Victorian tradition, came to define modern Los Angeles. Ray, in the end, is remembered as the author who proved that pulp fiction could aspire to more than the plotting of violence, but that was not what he set out to do. From the start Ray saw crime writing as a way to learn the mechanics of storytelling, and though he wanted to write a crime novel, he also hoped that he would eventually move beyond his most famous creation, Philip Marlowe, and one day be able to forget mystery stories altogether. Privately he found his failure to do so frustrating, but publically he gave short shrift to any suggestion that he should write a serious novel. By the end of his life, I believe, he had come to understand that his inability to overcome Philip Marlowe was also part of his success. With each apparently futile attempt to write something other than a crime novel he managed to expand the boundaries of what it was possible to achieve within the genre and, in so doing, turned it into art.

Unfortunately, this achievement also came at a great cost. Alcoholism cast a long shadow over Ray’s life. His father was a violent drunk and, despite being all too aware of his father’s weaknesses, Ray could not prevent himself succumbing to the same addiction. Drinking, loneliness, and a peculiarly British form of arrogance sometimes made him seem distant and aloof, even to his closest friends. Often in his letters he comes across as bitter and short-tempered and in person he could be even worse. At other times, however, he could be warm and generous. He was patient with new writers and had a seemingly endless appetite to debate the issues of the day, whether they were literary, cinematic, political, or even culinary.

As a biographer I have taken an unflinching look at every stage of Ray’s life, and what I have seen has not always been pleasant. Since his death in 1959, Ray has been charged with racism and misogyny, while others have trawled his novels for signs of both repressed homosexuality and homophobia. In the pages that follow, readers may find ample material upon which to build a case for all of these. I have, however, decided to resist the temptation to interrogate such attitudes. Neither have I spent time on the excuse that they are merely the product of a particular era. Ultimately, I have chosen to leave Ray’s readers to reach their own conclusions.

My first encounter with Raymond Chandler took place at my university, where The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely were featured in a seminar on crime fiction. Little did I think then that I would end up writing a book about the author of those novels; from the very first page I read, though, I was fascinated, not just with Philip Marlowe but also with the world in which he existed and that inspired his creation. So, in this book, I have tried to set Ray’s achievement into a wider cultural and historical context. It has taken six years, and my research has taken me to California, Canada, and Oxford. It has been hard, often overwhelming, and in the end, it is impossible to set down a life on paper without some excisions and some difficult choices. I take responsibility for all of these. Likewise any errors contained herein are my own.

Raymond Chandler once joked that the biographies of writers that appear on the back of their books make them dog themselves out in a velveteen smoking jacket, a cap with a tassel, a pipe full of Craven Mixture, and lollygag around admiring themselves instead of putting out a little careful but uneven prose.¹ He was always unnerved by pretension and, I suspect, the thought of a book about him would smack of exactly that. However, despite the darkness in his life, the more I understand about it, the better I appreciate his literary work. I hope that the shade of Raymond Chandler, wherever he may be, will see that this book is about connecting the two, and showing the real, lasting vitality of his art.

London-Los Angeles 2006–2012

CHAPTER ONE

MY FATHER WAS AN ALCOHOLIC

Raymond Chandler was born on July 23, 1888, in an upper room of a small, red brick house on Langley Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. A doctor, by the name of Martin Walter, had been called to help but the birth was straightforward and, after a few hours, Chandler arrived in the world. Within his lifetime Ray, as he was known to family and friends, would become associated with another city, Los Angeles, in another state, California, by writing a series of crime novels that feature tough men and even tougher women. At first, though, there was only one tough guy in his life: Ray’s father, Maurice Chandler.

Very little is known about Maurice. He appears infrequently in Ray’s letters and, when he does, it is with disdain and even shame. He was born on August 15, 1858, somewhere in Chester County, Pennsylvania, into a family that could trace its heritage back to Quaker settlers who had left Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His parents, Amy and John Chandler, were farmers, wealthy enough to send their son to study engineering at the Towne Scientific School at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a good school with a sound reputation and, when Maurice matriculated in 1880, his parents had high hopes for him. Quakers were generally diligent and hardworking; Maurice, though, was not, and his university career was marked by a singular lack of success. He left after only two years, without a degree. The reasons behind Maurice’s departure from university are not clear, but we know from his later years that he was a man who shirked responsibility, gave up too quickly, and was easily distracted. No doubt the qualities that made him a bad student also made him a bad father and husband.

He did, however, leave university in 1882 with enough education to achieve a certificate of proficiency, sufficient to get him a job as an engineer working for a Midwestern railway company at the heart of what was, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a rapidly expanding industry. The impact of the railways on the economic shape of America was, for the first time, to link the outlying regions directly to commercial centers like Chicago. In turn, these cities became great entrepôts, with goods being sent to the great cities in the East and then on to markets beyond. Journeys that had taken days now took hours; large amounts of corn, pork, and beef could be delivered quickly, without risk of spoilage; and it was profitable for both rural regions and cities. From the 1840s, corn grown on the plains of Nebraska (then the world’s largest cultivated region) was being sold across the world. The American Midwest was so essential to the international diet that it was known as the world’s breadbasket.¹ This was a trade only made viable by the railways.

When Maurice Chandler joined the industry, many of the major rail-building projects were complete. The first transcontinental railway had been officially finished thirteen years earlier, on May 10, 1869, when the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines was commemorated by the striking of a golden spike. Nonetheless, in an environment that saw one in every thirty-two Americans employed in the rail industry by 1881, it did not take Maurice long to find work with the Union Pacific company.² There were still plenty of smaller branch lines to be built as Chicago continued its expansion and his engineering qualification saw him attached to one of the many teams that planned routes, laid track, and repaired old, worn-out lines. The work was tough and that meant long hours and extended periods away from home. It kept him moving through the Midwest for five years, following the lines that radiated out of Chicago through Illinois, Nebraska, and Wyoming, so that his twenties were essentially nomadic. He measured out his bachelor days in the boarding house rooms in small towns and temporary company tenements.

Things changed for Maurice in 1886. He was working first in Omaha— then famous as a center of debauchery and illicit activity—and later in Laramie, Wyoming. It was a new town—so new in fact that the trees that lined the roads were still saplings—and, compared to the excitement to be found elsewhere in nineteenth-century Omaha,³ it was a quiet one. There he met the woman who would later become his wife. Her name was Florence Dart Thornton. She had bright blue eyes set in a strong square face and a head of thick brown hair that she would braid and pin into a chignon for formal occasions. She had only been in America for a year but her good looks had already caught the attention of many Laramie men.

Florence was born in Ireland in 1861 to Isaac and Anna Thornton who, like Maurice’s parents, were Quakers. They lived in Waterford, which coincidentally was the same Irish city from which Maurice Chandler’s ancestors had emigrated two or three generations earlier. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Waterford was a busy port, built on the River Suir, with a reputation for producing much-sought-after crystal and cut glass. For much of its existence it was considered Ireland’s second city, and, like the rest of the country, was dominated by an Anglo-Irish elite. The Thorntons, as nonconformist Quakers, were not quite part of this elite but were close enough to rub shoulders with the city’s leading families, and ran a successful firm of solicitors with offices in Waterford, Dublin, and Cork. Isaac was head of the firm and oversaw a prosperous business, providing the family with enough capital to live in a large house outside the city and keep themselves in considerable Victorian comfort.

Isaac died suddenly in the late 1870s, leaving Anna to take over the household. She was a tyrant and a bully by all accounts and brought up her five daughters and only son, Ernest, in strict adherence to her moral and religious code. When Ernest reached university age, she forced him to study law, which he agreed to reluctantly. He had no wish to join the family firm, but when it came down to it, Ernest could not resist his mother’s will.⁴

The Thorntons, and Anna in particular, were fiercely proud of their Quaker roots, which, she believed, located them squarely in the upper echelons of the British Empire. The flipside of this was that Anna had a great disliking for both Catholicism and for the Irish working class that formed the bulk of the congregation, and she brought her children up to share that prejudice.⁵ Anna could often be heard boasting that her family had no Catholic connections, not even by marriage: the Thorntons were pure Anglo-Irish Quakers.

A crisis came upon the Thornton family in the first years of the 1880s, in the person of a boiler inspector called Ernest Fitt. He had fallen in love with Florence’s sister, Grace, and the two wanted to marry. Anna Thornton was appalled. She approached the problem of marriage in the same way that she approached Ernest’s reluctance to study law: she attempted to bully Grace into giving him up. This time, however, Anna’s victim would not be broken down and, when it became clear that there was no hope of compromise, Grace and her lover decided the only course open to them was to emigrate to America.

Twelve months later, at the age of twenty-five, Florence followed. Her motivation for leaving is less clear. She was not involved in any forbidden relationships as far as we know and could probably have looked forward to marriage, children, and security in Waterford had she stayed. But in the wake of Grace’s departure, life there steadily worsened. Without her sister, Florence bore the brunt of her mother’s wrath and, eventually, it became intolerable. America must have seemed like the answer to her prayers, and in 1886, with all the impetuousness of youth, Florence packed her possessions and left, with hardly a penny to her name save for what she could borrow or had secretly saved at home.

The journey itself was tough. It was rare for young women to travel unaccompanied and rarer still for them to do so without the support of their parents. At Queenstown, she boarded a ship to New York and, like the majority of emigrants, she found her place in steerage. For the ten days or so that it took to cross the Atlantic, she lived in dark, cramped, and dirty conditions, sharing her living space with crowds of fellow passengers, some as filthy as her surroundings. It was a journey for which her sheltered upbringing in Water-ford could not have prepared her.

At first, many passengers would have been sick, unused to the movement of the sea. The stench would have been awful and respite, in the form of a trip to the upper decks, was only occasional. At night, Florence slept in a caged bunk cot with other women above and below her; by day she was ejected, forced to mingle with her fellow passengers while the accommodation was cleaned. Was she shocked by some of the people she met? Stowaways and runaways were not uncommon on the Atlantic crossings and her beauty would have no doubt brought unwanted attention. In her old life, men, other than those in her immediate family, would have remained mysterious creatures. On board a ship, they would be very real and very close.

There was music, at least. Emigrants would have packed fiddles and other musical instruments to help while away the journey, and groups would have gathered to sing hymns and favorite songs late into the night. The food, though, was not good. Old meat and thin soup were the daily diet.

After nearly two weeks of this, Florence landed at New York’s Castle Garden, where immigrants were received until 1890 when the more famous Ellis Island opened. This was not the end of her journey, however, and she faced a night in a cheap New York boarding house before taking a train the next morning, first to Chicago, and then onwards to Laramie.

Traveling by train was no more comfortable than by ship. For two days she sat on rough, wooden benches, crammed into a plain carriage with only a stove to warm it, and a single toilet,⁶ as the train rocked its way steadily through its almost one thousand–mile journey to Chicago. There was not even a view to alleviate the boredom. Robert Louis Stevenson, who made an identical journey only a few years earlier, in 1879, described what he saw as he passed through the deserts of Wyoming:

To cross such a plain is to grow home-sick for mountains…. Hour after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications … not a tree, not a patch of sward, not one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-brush, eternal sage-brush … and for sole sign of life, here and there a few fleeting antelopes … there was not one good circumstance in that Godforsaken land.⁷

Better things did await Florence in Laramie.⁸ There, she found her sister happily married to the boiler inspector and preparing to have children. They had made a good life in the town and Florence fit in with them easily. She was glad to have turned her back on Waterford, and in Wyoming she grew into a confident, happy young woman. She spent her days helping Grace at home—doing housework, shopping, looking after baby Muriel once she was born—while Ernest was at work. For the first time in her adult life, she could relax without the mantles of class and religion that had been forced upon her. She lived like this for a year and was content.

In 1887, just as she was finding her feet, her world changed again. How did this pretty Irish girl come to be introduced to a gruff railway engineer like Maurice Chandler? One possible explanation is that they met through her brother-in-law, Ernest Fitt.

Fitt looked to better himself in America and at some point was employed as a draftsman and later as a civil engineer.⁹ If he worked in these roles as early as 1887, he may well have come across Maurice Chandler professionally, inviting his new friend to meet his wife and recently arrived sister-in-law, perhaps hoping that the young bachelor might take Florence off his hands. However Maurice and Florence met, there seems to have been an immediate attraction and their relationship moved with surprising speed, hastened no doubt by the knowledge that Maurice’s time in Wyoming was limited. When his job finished he would have to follow the work and as this moment drew closer, Florence was forced to make a choice. Would she stay with her sister and brother-in-law, or would she go away with Maurice? In the end, with the same impetuousness that brought her to America, Florence chose Maurice.

The young couple were married at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church. They had known each other less than a year. The ceremony was performed amidst ominous quiet by the Reverend George Cornell and witnessed by a pair of drifters, William and Nettie Comley.¹⁰ The circumstances of the marriage— the hastiness with which it came about and the fact that Ernest and Grace did not attend—raise questions. The relationship may have been a passionate one but was it, in the eyes of Florence’s sister and brother-in-law, also a bad one?

Maurice and Florence stayed in Laramie for a couple of months and it was there that Ray was conceived. Ray always thought things might have turned out better had the Chandlers remained in the area but circumstances were against them and Maurice’s work took him towards Chicago. Maurice knew Chicago well. He almost certainly lived there early in his career and would have traveled through it often while working. Florence had also visited before, but only briefly, stopping over for a few hours while changing trains on her way to her sister’s. It was all new to her and certainly very different from the kind of environment to which she was accustomed.

There were six rail termini in Chicago, with trains from Wyoming ending their journey at Union Station. It was there that Florence disembarked. The first thing she would have noticed would have been the smell: the stench of rubbish and manure, mingling with the foul odor of the out-of-town stockyards,* blown in on the prairie winds.

Trains also made Chicago noisy and dangerous. Around a thousand a day came into the city, traveling along tracks that carved through the city. Since 1857, Chicago’s railway network had been the largest in the world, and city authorities had little or no control over its expansion. It was the product of pure, unbridled capitalism. Tracks crossed major roads and intersections, blocking traffic and pedestrians while the iron monsters, tugging behind them innumerable wagons, belched their way to the station. It is hardly surprising that the accident toll was high in this environment and, in the year of Raymond Chandler’s birth, an average of two Chicagoans were killed every day by trains.¹¹

Perhaps most shocking of all for Florence would have been the city’s sheer size. She had never fully experienced a place like Chicago but, after all, cities like it had not existed for long. Chicago was built on a different scale, to a different template, and, unlike older settlements, it had expanded not just outward but upward.

When Florence arrived in Chicago, it was already home to some of the most famous and innovative tall buildings in the world. In the past, urban skylines had been dominated by the spires, crosses, and domes of churches, mosques, and synagogues, but Chicago’s skyline was characterized by capitalist rather than spiritual devotion. Each new building had to be bigger and better and Chicago soon became a perpetual building site. Mark Twain wrote,

Chicago [is] a city where they are always rubbing a lamp and fetching up a genii and contriving and achieving new possibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try and keep up with Chicago—she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.¹²

Buildings like the Montauk Block (Burnham and Root, 1882–1883) and the Rookery (Burnham and Root, 1888) changed the way that Chicago’s inhabitants looked at the city, and not always in a good way. People began to fear that the buildings were getting too tall—so tall, in fact, that they risked blocking out the sun itself, creating canyon-like streets never touched by natural light. These fears were not realized,¹³ but it goes to show quite how little these architectural developments were understood and how intimidating they could be.

How strange Chicago must have appeared to Florence, who was familiar with the three- and four-story buildings of Waterford’s industrial area. Buildings with ten, eleven, and even more stories would have seemed quite awesome and daunting.

Maurice and Florence set up their first home on Langley Avenue, close to the lakefront in Chicago’s southeastern suburbs. Meanwhile, Maurice’s job had not changed very much. Despite his new wife and the imminent arrival of his first child, he was still working out of and around the Midwest, and Florence often found herself alone. This made life very difficult for the expectant mother. She had no family in the immediate vicinity, and whatever support she needed had to come from her new neighbors.

Florence went into labor on July 23, 1888, and gave birth the same day. She named her baby boy Raymond Thornton Chandler, giving him her own maiden surname as a middle name. He was christened shortly after and, as part of the experience, taken to G. W. Varney, a nearby photographer, where he posed for his first photograph in his christening gown.

Sadly, we know very little about Ray’s earliest years. The two photographs from this period suggest a relatively normal childhood but they lack context. One, taken when he was around eighteen months old, shows a chubby-cheeked little boy wearing a traditional gown, perched awkwardly on a chaise longue in a photographer’s studio. In his hand, he is clutching a doll, a favorite toy, called Alfred. This picture shows early evidence of the shyness from which Ray was to suffer throughout his life: his gaze is drawn away from the camera and he is looking nervously at someone out of shot who was perhaps trying to reassure him and elicit a smile. The photograph was probably taken as a memento for Maurice because Ray and his mother were about to make their first trip away together. It was time, Florence felt, to visit her mother in Ireland.

Ray and Florence left Chicago some time in the summer of 1890,* when Ray was just two years old, and made the long rail journey to New York. From there they took the boat to Queenstown in Ireland and then on to Waterford. Taking a very young child on such a long journey was brave but it appears that, this time, Florence could at least afford the luxury of a cabin to make the crossing a little easier.¹⁴ The food was better—meat and vegetables served at the table in a dining room, rather than the thin soups she had endured on her last journey—and a cabin also provided greater privacy, an obvious advantage for a young mother. Nonetheless, the journey was still a hard one.

Why did Florence and Ray make that long journey back to Ireland? There is no evidence to suggest a family emergency. Florence’s father was already dead and there is no reason to believe her mother was ill. If there had been a crisis, we can also assume that she would have traveled with her sister. Did Florence travel because her mother demanded it? Anna was an exacting woman and may have insisted on seeing her grandson. But the trip had other advantages, too. Aside from introducing her family to her beautiful baby boy, Florence could show her mother what a success she had made of her life and make clear to her family that she was now no longer Miss Thornton but Mrs. Chandler.

At some point during the crossing, Alfred, Ray’s doll, fell overboard. It must have upset the young child to lose such a precious toy, and the loss probably put extra pressure on Florence, who must have been expecting the visit to be a challenging one. Miraculously, though, Alfred reappeared once they arrived in Ireland, as Ray recalled years later. Perhaps this was a good omen.

Florence always felt the weight of her mother’s disapproval keenly and, though she must have hoped that the presence of baby Raymond would help mitigate her mother’s choler, it is unlikely that Anna was anything other than her usual bad-tempered self during the visit. As her later behavior suggests, Anna was not a woman who forgave easily, and the reunion with her daughter may have been uncomfortable for everyone involved. But Florence’s preparedness to face Anna is characteristic of the bravery she showed in her late twenties. There is little doubting her resilience.

The young boy’s own thoughts about this first visit to Ireland are not recorded. Ray seems to have remembered very little of his experience during the trip other than the loss of Alfred and his miraculous recovery at a hotel. While his mother and grandmother tried to reconcile, it is probable that Ray kept his own quiet counsel, spending his days as he would have done in Chicago, playing with Alfred and his other toys, toddling about under the supervision of a servant, making his chubby-cheeked way around the Waterford house, and getting to know his uncle Ernest and aunts.

Their stay came to an end in late October when Florence and Ray headed home, boarding the SS Servia at Queenstown and landing in New York on the 27th. They headed straight back to Chicago. It would be nice to imagine Maurice waiting for his wife and son at LaSalle Street Station, where the trains from New York terminated, but it is more likely that he was away working and that Florence and Ray made their way back to their Langley Avenue home on their own. While they waited for one of his brief visits, Florence no doubt tried her hardest to settle into the life that she had just sold to her mother as happy and successful.

The following summer in Chicago was extraordinarily hot, and seventeen people died in the heatwave.¹⁵ Florence made the decision to take Ray to stay with her sister, who had now moved to Plattsmouth, Nebraska. It was the first of what was to become a series of annual vacations lasting until 1895. It is clear that Ray enjoyed the time he spent there. Semirural, slightly backward Plattsmouth, sitting on the banks of the Missouri River, was a complete change from the stench and noise of Chicago. Wild grapes grew on roadsides and residents gathered them to make wine. At night, fireflies buzzed brightly through the evening sky while people sat out on rocking chairs, gossiping with neighbors.¹⁶ During the day, Ray was left to play with his cousin, Muriel Fitt, who, despite being two years older, seems to have let Ray take charge. In fact, some of their games were surprisingly adult—he once admitted pulling down her underwear and admiring her firm bottom.¹⁷ Plattsmouth was not quite a paradise, though, and Ray characteristically recalled his happy times there being interrupted one day by the appearance of a dead body floating down the muddy river.¹⁸

Florence enjoyed Plattsmouth too. She was able to relax and, for the first time, share the responsibilities of childcare with someone else. She must also have enjoyed spending time with her sister and brother-in-law. Their adult company would have made a welcome change from the duties of her day-to-day life. Ray also seems to have benefited from being among grown-ups. He would sit at the feet of his uncle and aunt as they told stories about their families that fired his young imagination:

My … uncle’s (by marriage only) name was Ernest Fitt…. He used to come home in the evening … put the paper on the music rack and improvise while he read it…. He had a brother who was an amazing character. He had been a bank clerk or manager back in Waterford … and had embezzled money … and with the help of the Masons, escaped the police net to … Europe. In some hotel in Germany his money was stolen, or most of it. When I knew him, long after, he was an extremely respectable old party, always immaculately dressed, and of incredible parsimony.¹⁹

There was also an uncle who was a crooked politician and yet another who invented a machine to take on mail without stopping, but somebody beat him out of it and he never got a dime.²⁰ Ray later said he should write a book about them, which does raise the question of how much he embellished these stories but, regardless, it seems clear that the original versions fascinated him. It is easy to imagine the young Ray listening to his uncle’s tales as they unfolded, noting as he did so that being a storyteller brought plenty of attention.

Of course, summers in Plattsmouth had to come to an end, and Ray and Florence spent the rest of each year in Chicago. At some point, Ray underwent some education there and certainly had friends in the city: according to his own account, he was part of a gang, though it was not criminal in any way.²¹ He would also have seen the construction of the site of the Chicago World’s Fair that was emerging steadily. He may have watched as a strange, enormous wheel-like structure, designed by William Ferris, was raised against the sky, but whether or not he ever visited the exhibition after it opened in 1893 and saw the first Ferris wheel, the first shredded wheat, or the first zippers, we do not know.

In Chicago, Florence found life difficult. Whatever had originally drawn her to Maurice did not last. His long absences depressed her, but his rare visits home depressed her even more. And, as Ray grew up, he became increasingly aware of the domestic problems his mother and father faced. During the 1890s, his parents’ marriage was steadily unraveling and they had no other children after Ray. Their slow but inevitable breakup would leave a serious psychological scar on Ray, but blame for the end of the marriage lies largely with Maurice.

On his son’s birth certificate, Maurice describes himself as a civil engineer. Ray rarely spoke about his father but, in the 1950s, at some of his lowest points, he began to open up to his friend Natasha Spender. He told her that his father used to be in charge of a track-laying team.²² We know that this means Maurice would often have been out in the wilderness with a gang of trackmen working under his supervision. It was their job to lift and then lay the track and sleepers, while Maurice directed them. For the men doing the lifting, it was hard work (twelve-hour shifts were not uncommon), and it was dangerous and badly paid to boot (the trackmen on the Sante Fe line received a little over $1.20 a day for their work²³). Managing them would scarcely have been any easier. The situation would not have been helped by the differences between the trackmen and the well-off, college-educated engineers who ordered them around. Trackmen usually had little or no education—the only qualification they needed was the ability to hit a metal spike with a heavy hammer. They came from the poorest families, often had criminal backgrounds, and were well known for their insubordination.²⁴ Engineers had the difficult task of corralling these motley crews into working to the tight schedules demanded by the railway companies. It often meant coercing them to extended periods of hard labor. Earning the respect of these often violent and thuggish men was imperative, and being away from the eyes of civilization opened up certain options to men like Maurice: more often than not, they resorted to the timeworn method of sheer, brute force. In the end, Maurice Chandler was probably just another one of the many Mr. Kurtzes whose violent conduct was tolerated by the railway companies as long as it was effective.

Maintaining control in the wilderness through violence and oppression must have put Maurice under tremendous strain. And, like many others, he found relief in drink which, for the sake of the manual laborers, would have been readily and cheaply available in very large quantities. Maurice became a heavy and frequent drinker, swigging his way to oblivion to alleviate the stress of work, and before long he was a full-blown alcoholic. His alcoholism, along with day-to-day violence and the constant company of men, had a disastrous effect on his visits home: Maurice could not adjust to the quiet domesticity of Florence and Ray, and the peaceful atmosphere was shattered when he returned.

Chicago was an ideal city for a drunk. Distilling was the city’s second industry after meat packing. At one point, it was estimated that the drinks trade in Chicago was worth a million dollars a year and, in 1865, the city produced 7 million gallons of beer, or 39 gallons for every man, woman, and child in the city. By the 1880s, there was one bar for every two hundred residents, and the city’s extensive pleasure districts were not only tolerated but also actively protected by the police. Temperance societies boomed and one of Burnham and Roots’s early skyscrapers was the Women’s Christian Temperance Building, the tallest building in the world in 1890. Groups promoting abstinence created a lot of noise but had little effect on the city’s drinking habits: alcohol was everywhere and always available to a man like Maurice with money and a thirst.²⁵

Faced with a drunken husband, Florence remained strong. She had learned to stand up to her mother’s bullying and was not ready to be subdued by Maurice. They argued fiercely but Maurice did not stop at verbal confrontation: he began to beat Florence. If she complained, he hit her again and kept doing so until she was quiet. It is hard to know quite how much of this domestic violence Ray saw. He could never bring himself to write about his father’s behavior and only when he was drunk could he bring himself to speak about Maurice at all. As a result, according to Natasha Spender, his accounts were not consistent: sometimes he claimed to have seen his father beat his mother, while on other occasions he denied it. He must certainly have known what was going on. Though he was perhaps only four or five when the beatings started, he could not have missed the bruises on his mother’s body or the change in her manner. As a small child, however, he was utterly powerless to do anything about it. How long Florence endured the beatings is impossible to guess but, by 1895, she and Ray had left Langley Avenue, and Maurice.

At around this time, when he was seven years old, Ray developed scarlet fever: I remember principally the ice cream and the pleasure of pulling loose skin off during convalescence.²⁶ Florence had been reduced to living in boarding houses and cheap hotels. Without Maurice’s financial support, her options were limited. With no money and no job she headed to Plattsmouth to live with her sister.

Ray was enrolled in a school in the East Fourth Ward of Plattsmouth, where his teacher was Lettie C. Smith.²⁷ His grades there were good but not remarkable, despite his intelligence. This may be explained by a complicated home life which put him under some strain. Mrs. Smith was not Ray’s teacher for long. Her notes tell us that he was taken back to Chicago as a result of what would be the first of several attempted reconciliations between his mother and father.

Maurice and Florence had not given up on their marriage entirely. Florence must have hoped that things would be different and, at any rate, was perhaps concerned that her young son needed his father, and she thought the sacrifice worth it. Over the next few years, they were to go back and forth from Chicago to Plattsmouth several times. This must have been an unsettling and difficult experience for her, but especially so for Ray. Whatever hope kept drawing her back to Chicago and to Maurice eventually died. Florence began to accept that the relationship could not be saved.

She left Chicago for good, possibly as late as 1900, returning to Plattsmouth one last time. This decisive move was to deny Maurice any further sway over their son.

Ray never forgave his father and, once he and Florence had fled, made a concerted effort to cut Maurice out of his life. He all but wrote Chicago out of his own story, too, and avoided mentioning his father at all, preferring to let his friends imagine him growing up in rural Plattsmouth, surrounded by eccentric uncles. It is not clear what happened to Maurice. He disappears from the records and Ray made no effort to find him. When, in 1917, he joined the Canadian army to fight in World War I and was asked if his father was still living, he wrote, I don’t know.²⁸ Still, whether Ray acknowledged him or not Maurice was to cast a long shadow over his life.

The consequence of witnessing domestic violence was to wire into Ray’s brain a desire to protect women, starting with his mother. As this trait emerged in him, the personality of his great creation, the detective Philip Marlowe, also began to form. The phrase shop-soiled Galahad, used by Ray to describe Marlowe, also suggests how he viewed himself: chivalrous, a protector of women, but not in a purely abstract, romantic sense.

Maurice may have spurred his son’s creativity but his despicable conduct also laid many emotional landmines for him to negotiate in the future. Ray’s writing betrays a preoccupation with the idea that vices and moral weakness might be inherited. Would he, like his father, become a violent alcoholic?

Florence, meanwhile, had to look to Ray’s future. He needed a home and an education. After some serious consideration, she decided that, for the sake of her son, she was happy to sacrifice her own happiness by returning to Ireland and her family. She knew her mother would not accept her divorce and would make her life difficult, but Ireland was the only way forward for the two Chandlers. There, at least, she would be out of Maurice’s reach and could more easily resist the temptation to go back.

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* Animal slaughter occurred in the stockyards on a massive scale. Something like seventy thousand animals were brought in every morning, then sold and slaughtered immediately so that the whole process could begin again the next day. It was a process that saw nine hundred million animals slaughtered every year. (See Miller, City of the Century.)

* This was a good year for Chicago. In February the city found out that it had won the lucrative bid to host the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition in 1893, which would put it on the world stage, and though Ray was very young in the year that it was announced, as he grew up, he would have become increasingly aware of its presence.

CHAPTER TWO

I WAS RAISED ON LATIN AND GREEK

Ray was twelve years old when he and his mother made the long trip back to Waterford, leaving behind them domestic violence and drunkenness, only to submit themselves instead to the class-ridden, intolerant, bullying atmosphere of the Thornton family home. It was a journey through time as well as space, which saw them turn their backs on the bright novelty of Chicago and Plattsmouth, and enter, instead, the chilly embrace of